Upsell baloney on Wi-Fi routers

Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 Smart Wi-Fi Router offers more features than most users will need.

Photo: Cnet

Upselling is an American tradition that has helped drive business profits since the days of the surrey with the fringe on top. Today, the strategy of making buyers think they need the newest and coolest products stretches from cars and kitchen appliances to home electronics.

In fact, consumer technology has opened vast opportunities for upselling, mainly because sellers are dealing with buyers who have little-to-no idea about the technology inside digital devices. The problem is that sales people in stores are in the same boat: They don’t know anything either.

That all-around ignorance has enabled manufacturers and operators of big stores to upsell by confounding and seducing consumers with exotic terms — and without a shred of evidence that the latest-and-greatest tech specs are worth paying for.

The best example of this right now involves Wi-Fi routers — the devices that make your Internet signal available to wireless devices throughout your home. I was at Staples the other day and was struck by the sophisticated way routers were being upsold. The devices were displayed in three categories: Moderate Bandwidth, for basic Web browsing on 1 or 2 devices; Higher Bandwidth, for social media and gaming on 3 to 4 devices; and Highest Bandwidth, for streaming HD video, gaming and cloud storage on 5 or more devices.

More by David Einstein

The moderate bandwidth devices used Wireless-N, while the higher and highest bandwidth models had the newer Wireless-AC standard. Many of the latter two categories also sported features like multiple antennas and three frequency bands, rather than the two found in high-end Wireless-N routers.

Prices ranged from less than $100 for a basic Wireless-N router to $400 for the Wireless-AC Netgear Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Smart WiFi Router with Tri-Band Quad-Stream.

Without getting too technical, the whole thing was a bunch of baloney. Of all the common uses for Wi-Fi, the only one that requires heavy bandwidth is online gaming, which involves a lot of data and two-way communication with a server. HD streaming isn’t all that data intensive, social networking is essentially the same as Web browsing, and cloud storage has nothing to do with router bandwidth.

As it happens, I own one of the “moderate bandwidth” routers, a Netgear N900 dual-band model that retails for $100. My Internet signal from Comcast reaches most areas of my house at around 25 megabits per second. The other night, I simultaneously streamed high-def video from different sources on two big-screen TVs, a desktop PC, a laptop and two smartphones — all without a buffer or a glitch.

So much for basic Web viewing on 1 or 2 devices. In fact, Netgear says that its consumer routers can accommodate up to 32 users per band — 64 users in my case (Apple’s routers can handle 50 users). Netgear notes that “Since the router’s wireless channel is shared between all the wireless clients, adding clients will inevitably result in slower network access for all clients.” But, as my experiment proved, you can put at least half a dozen devices on a “moderate” router with no ill effect.

Bottom line: If you’re in the market for a router, buy a dual-band Wireless-N model and test it out like I did. If it doesn’t pass muster, exchange it for a Wireless-AC model. But in any case, don’t be swayed by the lingo.

Q: I have an aging HP all-in-one color printer that I love. I can go away for long trips, come home, fire up the computer and print something and even the first page is great. However, my new computer doesn’t play well with the printer (I’ve tried reinstalling the driver to no avail). So I’ve been looking around for a new all-in-one inkjet printer. However, I’ve heard that today’s printers must be run weekly to keep the ink jets from drying out — and I’m often away from home for weeks at a time. Any suggestions?

A: It’s true that the print heads on inkjet printers can get dry and fail to work if the printer is left idle for too long.

Many newer printers, from companies including Canon and Hewlett-Packard, have print heads that can be removed and cleaned with water. But there’s an easier solution. Get a printer designed to work with Google Cloud Print, which will enable you to print from anywhere in the world using your smartphone or tablet. That way, you can run the printer every couple of weeks and keep the print head all spiffy.

David Einstein is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology. He was a San Francisco Chronicle business reporter from 1989 to 1999 and has written a weekly consumer technology column for the paper since 1997. He also has held writing and editing positions with the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Forbes.com.